New Product

Posted on June 01, 2009

ONStor is breaking its product mold by basing a new "unified storage" system for SMBs on open-source software and the Zettabyte File System (ZFS).

The Pantera LS 2100 series supports iSCSI and NAS, and includes a variety of built-in management tools based on the OpenSolaris operating system and ZFS.

The LS 2130 and 2150 models include support for RAID 5 and 6, snapshots and clones, differential replication for disaster recovery, self-healing capabilities, thin provisioning and data compression. Both systems use the ZFS hybrid storage pool to support combined SAS or solid-state disk (SSD) drives, as well as SATA drives for high capacity deployments.

The LS 2130 scales to 48 SAS or SATA drives, with a list price of $36,000 for a 15TB SATA configuration. The LS 2150 scales to 96 drives (SAS, SATA or SSD) and carries a price tag of $39,500 for 15TB of SATA storage.

ONStor plans to expand its ZFS-based product line by using it as the foundation for its NAS gateway products, along with the EverON StorFS file system on the company's Cougar line of NAS gateways. ONStor also plans to integrate the capabilities of the StorFS file system with ZFS to expand the performance and scalability of its NAS gateways for medium and large enterprises.

Permabit reduces archiving costs

Permabit is using bigger drives, faster processors and capacity optimization techniques to power the newest storage node in its Enterprise Archive Data Center Series of archiving platforms. The result is an archiving system that costs less than $1 per GB.

The Enterprise Archive Data Center Series Model 4010 uses 1TB Seagate ES.2 SATA drives to double the capacity of individual storage nodes to 4TB and boost total archive capacity from 32TB to 4.6PB.

With the 4010, Permabit has improved system performance by approximately 280% from previous nodes due to a move from dual-core processors to Intel's quad-core Xeon processors and some software enhancements.

The 4010 also features in-line data de-duplication, file-level WORM capabilities, and snapshots.

GridBank 1.5 includes enhancements such as 64-bit versions for Linux and Windows Server 2008, and e-discovery and search functionality for storage resources outside of the GridBank environment, but the key enhancement is support for Microsoft SharePoint, including Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0.

The integration with SharePoint includes business rule-based, granular archiving with full content index and search functionality.

Replay AppImage provides what the company calls "continuous application protection" which, in addition to the data, entails backing up entire applications, including tables, indexes, system/user database objects, SQL binaries, logs, and operating system. Via off-host processing, the company claims to eliminate the backup window. Other features include point-in-time granular recovery of databases and corruption detection.

New features in the Replay AppImage SQL Pack include log truncation and the ability to test backups. Pricing for Replay AppImage 3.1 starts at $899 per server, and the SQL Pack is priced at $499 per instance.

LSI supports 8Gbps FC

LSI now supports 8Gbps Fibre Channel host interfaces, as well as SafeStor encryption services that work with Seagate’s self-encrypting drives (SEDs), in its Engenio 7900 line of disk arrays.

SafeStor encryption services are designed to mitigate risks associated with costly data exposure and to meet regulatory requirements by combining LSI's controller-based firmware and local key management with Seagate's SEDs, which are based on Full Disk Encryption (FDE) technology. LSI plans to extend the encryption services to disk arrays beyond the Engenio 7900 and to its MegaRAID adapters in the future.

SafeStor is integrated with LSI's SANtricity Storage Manager software, and company officials claim that managing SEDs is as easy as managing traditional drives.

According to Steve Gardner, director of product marketing in LSI’s Engenio Storage Group, the drive-level encryption does not degrade performance and offers a number of advantages over other methods of encryption, such as network-based appliances.

"Putting the keys as close to the data as possible, at the drive level, provides better key management," Gardner claims. "It also allows features such as instant secure erase [which enables users to erase a drive's data in less than one second] and it makes it easier to manage encryption."

LSI also announced support for 8Gbps Fibre Channel host interfaces on the Engenio 7900 array, which now has 16 4Gbps or 8Gbps Fibre Channel connections and up to 448 FDE, Fibre Channel or SATA drives, for a total capacity of 448TB with 1TB SATA drives. The company also introduced 8Gbps Fibre Channel host cards.

i365 ships backup/recovery appliance

i365, which is known for its software, managed services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, has added hardware to its portfolio with the debut of the EVault Plug-n-Protect appliance, a pre-configured backup and recovery system.

The appliance consists of industry standard hardware and a pre-installed software suite, including EVault Software, System Restore and Real Time Protection, as well as a choice of agents and plug-ins for different systems and applications.

The system is available in three models in capacities of 6TB and 12TB and 36TB of SATA storage.

Pricing for the EVault Plug-n-Protect appliance starts at $35,000.

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